PUNE: The facility of online ticket booking for railway passengers sitting at home has become a source of income for unscrupulous touts. Of nearly seven lakh confirmed tickets sold online, six lakh go to touts forcing millions of passengers to travel on waiting list. Interestingly, the advanced software system seems to be beneficial to brokers who continuously breach the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) website.
The Railway Protection Force (RPF) recently exposed the international racket of e-ticket black marketing. It claimed that with the help of modern software, brokers book 85 per cent confirmed tickets in a pinch. The remaining 15 per cent of confirmed tickets are held by genuine railway passengers. More than three-and-half thousand long-distance passenger trains run daily across the country. Around 12 lakh confirmed tickets are booked every day.
The racket involves brokers from other countries too. The RPF Cyber Cell was set up in June 2019 at Pune Railway Division.
On February 6, Central Railway General Manager Sanjiv Mittal was on a one-day inspection in Pune Railway Division. While interacting with the media he said, “The first such unit set up by RPF anywhere in India, will go a long way in resolving the online crimes linked with Indian Railways.”
A senior officer of RPF, Central Railway said the Bangalore RPF nabbed one Gulam Mustafa for online ticket booking fraud. Gulam revealed that his boss was in in Dubai and handles the operation. On getting the tip from Bangalore RPF, the Pune Division RPF started investigating. The investigation revealed that the accused have links in Dubai, Nepal and Bangladesh.
“We have set up a special team to crack the links. The officers found it has an international link. A software called ANMS was found with a gang caught by the RPF. It helps to book three tickets in less than two minutes. IRCTC’s security measures like captcha, time difference in booking two tickets from one ID, OTP etc. does not obstruct this software,” said the officer.
“In the programme, the details of the passengers are put in first and until the ticket is booked, the software keeps on repeatedly hitting the website’s server. There is absolutely no manual intervention in this process. The common passenger takes three minutes to complete the process and book a ticket,” the officer said. RPF claimed that 20,000 sub-agents of IRCTC are allegedly working with fraudsters.
FIRST RPF CYBER CELL IN PUNE
“To solve such crimes, it’s important for the RPF personnel to find out the call details record (CDR) of the accused, find out their tower locations among other things. Considering this the Railway Ministry decided to start ‘cyber cells’ in RPF. As a pilot project, six such cells would come up at six locations. The first has come up in Pune and is already functioning. They will be able to probe cases scientifically, crack the software used to cheat people, monitor online money transactions made by travel agents and screen cellphones of accused and victims,” said Mittal.
